Covid: Fresh demand to reopen schools in Odisha

BHUBANESWAR: With the daily Covid-19 case count expected to fall further in the coming days, parents and experts have urged the Odisha government to reopen schools.
Though the state government has planned to resume online classroom teaching for primary classes, educationists doubted whether children will avail of its benefits.
“Time to open schools as it is impacting the mental health of kids staying at home from the last two years.They are the future and should not be staying home for this long,” tweeted Parthiv Mehta, the parent of a school student, requesting the chief minister to consider reopening of schools.
Following a surge in Covid-19 cases, driven by the Omicron variant of the coronavirus in the third wave of the pandemic, the Odisha government had decided to shut down offline classes for the students of classes 6 to 12 from January 5.
Besides, the state had also postponed its decision to reopen primary classes on January 3, after a gap of 22 months, due to the fear of infection among children.
“We were happy when the state announced to resume schools after almost 22 months. I had bought new uniforms and shoes for my daughters. But suddenly the cases started spiralling, postponing all the plans. Now when the daily cases have started dropping, we can hope that the government will consider reopening schools. When everything else is open, it is a torture on children that they remain inside for months,” said Pratima Senapati, a parent, whose daughters are in classes 7 and class 5.
Experts have also been expressing concern over the academic loss of children due to prolonged closure of schools.
“By keeping children at home, we are only causing harm to them. When the government can conduct elections, open malls and markets, how can we keep our children safe?” asked academician Pritish Acharya.
In the past couple of days, the state’s daily caseload has been recording a drop from over 10,000 cases to around 8,000.
The All Odisha Parents Association has also urged the state government to consider reopening of schools, at least for students of classes 8 to 12.